Salt Slow
-
-
4.5 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- $8.99
Publisher Description
'Armfield is an enormous, gut-wrenching talent.' Daisy Johnson, author of Everything Under
'salt slow is exemplary. A distinct new gothic, melancholy, powerful and poised.' China Miéville, author of The City & The City
This collection of short stories is about women and their experiences in society, about bodies and the bodily, mapping the skin and bones of its characters through their experiences of isolation, obsession and love. Throughout the collection, women become insects, men turn to stone, a city becomes insomniac and bodies are picked apart to make up better ones. The mundane worlds of schools and sea side towns are invaded and transformed, creating a landscape which is constantly shifting to hold on to the bodies of its inhabitants. Blending the mythic and the gothic, the collection considers characters in motion – turning away, turning back or simply turning into something new.
From Julia Armfield, the winner of The White Review Short Story Prize 2018, Salt Slow is an extraordinary collection of short stories that are sure to dazzle and shock.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Armfield's unsettling, uncanny, and utterly delightful debut, wolves, mythological monsters, and seemingly ordinary girls and women abound. In "Formerly Feral," a girl's neighbor from across the street adopts a wolf and names her Helen. When the girl's parents divorce, her father remarries the neighbor and she gains a new stepsister in Helen, and the two develop a deep bond. In "Stop Your Women's Ears with Wax," Mona is on tour supporting a popular girl band making music that inspires violent desires in their young female fans. Black feathers in their dressing room hint at their more sinister true identity. In "Granite," a woman on the cusp of 30 finds a lover her first whose body is slowly turning to stone as she looks at him. The best story in the collection is the most conceptually ambitious: "The Great Awake," in which a person's ability to sleep is anthropomorphized, becoming a separate shadow entity. Armfield occasionally deploys startling, stunning turns of phrase: "Two a.m., the dark throat of summer." Razor-sharp, stylish, and imaginative, Armfield's collection is a dazzling introduction to a talented writer.
